Mu Shin Do Zen is the practice of rediscovering your sublime and infinite nature as the unborn Awareness before any awareness-of. Tat tvam asi. तत् त्वम् असि. "That" freely expresses itself as seeing, hearing, &c. There are many "things" in the universe to be aware of, yet none of them -- nor all together -- can exhaust Awareness itself occurring spontaneously at this very instant. Wonderful!
This wonderful Awareness-Yoga Realization is the same as Zen's Satori. It is something you can do yourself. In fact, nobody else can do it for you. Karmapas, Tulkus and Rinpoches are no help at all.
But you need to transcend thinking to experience the Great Roshi that is just your original Mind.
This does not mean destroy thinking in yourself totally; just transcend it. How?
By the intensive every day practice of what is sometimes called "mindfulness" and sometimes "No-mind" or even (in Charles Luk's wonderful Zen translations) "unmindfulness." Bodhidharma demonstrated this when he sat facing a wall for 9 years to completely cut off discriminating consciousness (thinking-mind).
I personally do this every day by sitting Seiza without getting absorbed into a thinking process, walking four miles without getting absorbed into a thinking process, playing the bamboo flute without getting absorbed into a thinking process, cooking dinner without getting absorbed into a thinking process, &c.
This doesn't mean no thoughts ever "come up," it just means that when they do they don't stick; vivid awareness and activity goes on, while thoughts do not. Try it! It's hard at first, but the resulting unbelievable vividness of your perceptions and the delight you feel in living makes all the effort totally worthwhile.
Is mine the only way? No. There are numberless "Dharma gates." Beware of teachers who would have you believe that only their own system works.
It's good to avoid philosophical hair-splitting and disputes. Everything is happening right here-now. Look into This and see for yourself!
Can you make the universe disappear?
If the Universe vanishes there's no problem, is there?
Yet what is there to vanish?
From where? Into what?
THIS is Omnipresent. What is THIS? It's merely the Holder of all Perspectives, if you can imagine a Holder that has no shape or form or any characteristics.
Call it the Be-Holding of all perspectives.
There is simply no way to sense anything in the Universe of color, shape, form, quality without Consciousness. Yet Consciousness Itself has no color, shape, form -- and its only "quality" is to be conscious!
The fact that one can feel one is wavering between being and non-being proves that Awareness (the Witnessing Power, and also the non-local locus of Witnessing things and beings) is prior to both being and non-being (if you consider being in the sense of objecthood)! This is precisely Prajna or Pure Consciousness (subject to a strange distortion called Ignorance and emeshed in name and form). It isn't the same as Emptiness. Emptiness is merely a realistic description of phenomena. Being and non being in the objective sense are both empty insofar as they're dependent on each other. However, as manifestation of the Dharma Body, they are not empty at all; they're full of Buddhahood.
Try this: sit still with your spine straight and the crown of your head pointed to the Sky and shut your eyes and envision a stream of clear, sparkling water pouring down through the crown of your head, filling up your entire body and overflowing it.
Being as such is no object or "being" but the clearing and lighting up by which reality is beheld.
The Magickal Reality is before any division of "inner" and "outer," and thus before any "self" and "other."
In Essence, the Magickal Reality is the Dharma Body which takes all sorts of forms without ever being trapped in or defined by them.
Letting Being be. ATIYOGA
In Yogic terms, we merely become aware of the essentially groundless nature of personal awareness; that it is a special case of the Lighting that lets beings be.
"Self" and "other" begin as a mere sense of disjunction between "wants." What I want is not what others want. Or it is, but "different people" want it. It all arises on the basis of a "theory of mind." But theory of mind arises because there is language and speech.
A cicada, a snake, a blue heron, a house fly -- all are "beings" that appear as if magically objectified within Consciousness. But they are not other than Consciousness itself (especially when seen from their own side).
What is the treasury of infinite light? It isn't the treasury of infinite light.
What is the Universe? It isn't the Universe.
All you can say is that Perceiving perceives, Experiencing experiences. It's only after the fact that you can talk about the "what" is perceived or experienced. But this is a dreamlike and transitory "what."
Let's say you could create a complete and detailed account of all the types of "particles" in the Universe and their many kinds of interactions. You would still not have accounted for Perceiving, only in an abstract way for some of "what" Perceiving perceives.
But "what" Perceiving perceives, or Experiencing experiences, isn't outside Perceiving and Experiencing. It is only aware of mirage-like perspectives on Itself.
As it stirs, it "experiences." As it goes still, it simply penetrates. At the summit it's all summit.
How do you make the Universe disappear?
Well, you yourself are an instrument designed for "collapsing probability wave function" into specific three dimensional forms within the fourth dimension (time).
All you have to do, then, is to stop collapsing probability wave function for just an instant, and for that bare instant the Universe will vanish completely, including the feedback loop that gives a sense of a "person" or "small consciousness" perceiving it! Along with all karmic states and situations, past present and future.
The Yogic way to do this is simple. It has nothing to do with taking drugs or driving yourself insane.
Become aware through natural breathing of the "energy" or primordial vibration that sustains your body as well as your thinking mind. Learn how to shift this energy. For example, once you've become keenly aware of It in meditation, suddenly focus all your attention "one-pointedly" into a spot the size of a fingertip precisely between your eyebrows or two inches down from your navel and one inch inside. The energy will naturally "go" there, and when it goes there it will cause the Universe to disappear. Only for an instant, but a timeless instant. Consciousness will remain, but "thinking" will stop, the proprioperception of having a body in three dimensional space will disappear, and you will experience naked Infinity. Why naked Infinity? Because it's Nirguna Brahman, without any qualities. But Saguna Brahman, or the whole Universe, is also Infinity, and the goal of Yoga is to be able to experience the Infinity of any and every state and situation including that of no-state and no-situation.
"Awareness Itself is Shiva."
Thus you realize, beyond any conceptual claim, that this Universe itself is Infinity.
Appearances are the insistence of Infinity.
It's natural as breathing. It IS breathing -- true breathing.
How does this relate to the bamboo flute?
The bamboo flute as played by Zen priests has a hair raising power to transport you directly into the Infinity of Infinity. This is not just the Infinity of the "Here and Now," which is kind of a joke anyway, but the Infinity that stands infinitely behind and over and under and around it. Amazing!
तत्त्वमस्यादिवाक्येन स्वात्मा हि प्रतिपादितः ।
नेति नेति श्रुतिर्ब्रूयादनृतं पाञ्चभौतिकम् ।। २५।।
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